Google services including Gmail suffered a brief outage affecting millions of users around the world, later the company confirmed the outage and said that the bug has been fixed.
On Friday afternoon, Gmail experienced disruption of service in web and mobile apps. The service was not accessible through third-party clients like Apple mail due to failure of back-end (IMAP) service. Other services like Google+ and Hangouts were also affected with some users reporting connectivity issues in Google Drive. However Google’s homepage and Calender was unaffected.
Google was quick to rectify the outage and apologized immediately through its Google+ account. The cause of the outage was due to an incorrect configuration sent by the internal system due to a software bug. The incorrect information that was sent for over 15 minutes generated errors and user requests were ignored.
Google’s site reliability team didn’t comment on the current outage but responded to a Reddit user about how much “freaking out” goes on when there is an outage. Google has not yet extensively addressed the outage though the worldwide outage must have affected businesses. About 63 percent of small businesses used Gmail, while another 29 percent were willing to do so in the future, according to a recent InformationWeek survey.
However Google had experienced major outages in 2009 which continued for days after which temporary glitches have lasted only for a few hours or to certain number of users.
“An internal system that generates configurations – essentially information that tells other systems hoe to behave – encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect information,” said Ben Trynor, Google’s VP of engineering. The company has promised to set up more systems to prevent these types of outages in the future.
[Source: Google ]
